Dayen gives his assessment of yesterday’s election results. Election Day 2011 is over, and the victories for Democrats – and more accurately, for liberal values – across the country largely shared a characteristic – they were successful defensive actions to stave off extremely draconian conservative objectives.

The President statement yesterday in Las Vegas on the Administration’s new refinancing initiative was circumspect about their claims. There’s a debate now about how effective and far reaching this will be, with some arguing it could have a significant economic effect, and others far more skeptical.

One thing many people aren’t factoring into this budget debate is the fact that it will be happening in a Presidential election season. The more established GOP candidates have begun to enter the race, and they will need to get votes from conservative backers. Therefore they will push the public conversation increasingly to the right.

The era of liberalism as a philosophy of government is over. The Democratic Party endorses this message.

Sadly, the actions of politicians in Washington are often more about ripping off the public to benefit a handful of well-connected and extremely wealthy donors while having little to do with any form of actual ideology or governing philosophy. In fact, nearly identical schemes to enrich large corporations at the expense of the public are used by both parties. The parties then take turns pretending this policy design is an outrage against conservatism or liberalism.

Michael Gerson of the Washington Post Editorial page really phones one in today. I know it is the day after Thanksgiving and there is a tendency to just rehash old arguments in an effort to get a column or blog post out, but really this is beautiful example of false equivalency and intellectual laziness topped with a cherry of partisan world view.

• The number one priority of Americans, Democrats and Independents is passing a new stimulus bill to create new jobs. The number one priority of Republicans is repealing health care.
• The number two priority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents is cutting federal spending.
• The number three priority of Americans, Democrats and Independents is repealing the health care bill.
• The number four priority of Americans, Republicans, Democrats and Independents is extending all of the Bush tax cuts.
• Americans and Independents do not track on one single issue with Republicans over Democrats.
• More Republicans want to pass a new stimulus bill to create jobs than extend all the Bush tax cuts.

Shortly after the 2008 election, I wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times in which I declared I was shifting my focus from studying the white middle class Macomb County, Michigan (which I had first examined in 1985) to the neighboring Oakland County, Michigan—the home of affluent Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills. As I noted then, from 1972 to 1988, Democratic presidential candidates lost the county by 20 points. Over the past two decades, the towns of Oakland County began to change from rust belt suburbs to affluent communities that are representative of the new knowledge economy—home to lawyers, high-tech professionals, and the educated elite.

Liberals should distance themselves from “liberalism.”